Thornfield Hall (31 page)

As I climbed the stairs I took the little bible from my pocket and kissed its black leather cover to give me courage. I feared little James had already grown cold as my daughter did all those years ago. Dread filled my heart. I did not think I could endure the piercing pain of another lost little one.

In the first room Bertha lay stretched out on the four-poster bed. In her arms lay Martha's son. What a difference a few hours can make to one so young. His face was not so wrinkled and his eyes were unscrewing as if his next move was to open them. Someone had cleaned him and he was mewling and squirming. Bertha gazed down on him with that besotted look that comes over women's faces when they see a new-born child – not just their own new-born but anybody's.

‘He's hungry,' she announced, as if hunger in babies were a novelty.

‘How is his mother? Martha, I mean.' It was taking me some time to adjust to this unexpectedly warm and living baby. Bertha jerked her head in the direction of the adjoining rooms and said nothing. I made my way through Grace's room to find out.

Martha was lying in bed with her face to the wall. Grace was haranguing her in a low urgent voice. ‘You must try. Unless you do, you are condemning that innocent little creature to starve. He didn't ask to be born.' She saw me at the door. ‘Look. Here's Mrs Fairfax. She'll tell you the same.' Grace looked at me in appeal. ‘She says she won't feed the baby.'

Martha whipped round and sat up in bed. The transformation in her appearance was as marked as the change in her son's. The livid swollen look to her face had gone and her skin was now pale again. Her eyes flashed with sudden energy. ‘Let's get this straight. I did not want a baby. I tried to get rid of it but nothing worked. I will not feed him. If I do that the next thing I know I'll be a wet nurse in some awful farmhouse. I'll be stuck in pig shit for ever. As soon as I can walk there he's going to the orphanage. There's a place you can leave them. Sort of swivel thing. They don't see you. You just pop the baby on it, give it a shove and it's gone.'

Grace said nothing. She turned on her heel and strode out through the door. I followed her. She went straight to Bertha. Her face and voice were calm as she spoke to her. ‘We are going to have to spoon feed him.'

‘Good,' said Bertha. ‘Show me.'

Spoon feeding a baby is a slow and tiresome business. It demands inexhaustible patience and neatness of hand. These are two qualities that Bertha possesses to a fault. The hands that made doll's clothes and fashioned flowers from silk were soon occupied in giving the gift of life to Martha's abandoned baby.

It was late when I climbed into my bed that night and I was very tired. It had been an eventful day. Since the morning I had witnessed a birth, seen a marriage abandoned and a death narrowly averted. Mr Rochester, my respected employer of long standing, had been exposed to the world as a fraud and a potential bigamist. His ancient and noble house would be the subject of scandal for years to come. At the same time he had unwittingly provided a refuge to an abandoned servant girl while she brought a new life into the world.

I will not, as some unkind people do, refer to the child by that vile term ‘bastard'. However it would be a violence to the truth to call him a love child. There may have been love, on Martha's part, at the time of his conception. I prefer not to speculate about the feelings of the Honourable Theodore Ingram on that occasion. Martha's small store of love was all used up before the time came to welcome her son into the world. She had nothing to offer the unfortunate child so she had turned her back on him and refused him her breast. With this thought the tears started to flow. The strong and conflicting emotions that I had controlled all day burst out like a river breaking its banks and I sobbed into my pillow like a green girl.

Morning brought no relief from the tide of disaster that was sweeping through Thornfield Hall. I knocked at Miss Eyre's door but there was no answer. When I ventured to look in I saw on the table a jeweller's box. When I opened it I saw that it contained the pearl necklace that Mr Rochester had given her. Further investigation revealed the wedding clothes hanging in the wardrobe. Strangest of all, the beautiful veil she had not worn on what was supposed to be her wedding day lay in a drawer ripped into two separate pieces. Now there was a puzzle. Jane was not malicious; she would not destroy what she could not have.

What was clear to me was that Miss Eyre had left. She had gone out into the world with little more than the clothes she stood up in. I regretted bitterly that I had not managed to exchange a few words with her, to let her know that I was still her friend and to ask her pardon for concealing Mr Rochester's strange situation from her. I was in debt to her, a situation that makes me uncomfortable; I owed her wages and a character. How would she manage without money and a character reference?

If I was upset that Miss Eyre had gone, Mr Rochester was distraught. He spent the day in the library gnashing his teeth and tearing his hair. We sent up his favourite meals to tempt him to eat. The beef, the apple tart, the crusty rolls came back untouched. I asked him about sending for Mr Carter, the surgeon, and was treated to a basilisk glare that would have stopped a running stag in its tracks.

The new footmen earned their keep, not sitting behind his carriage on the way to the continent but running up and down stairs for instructions and then haring off round the neighbourhood in quest of sightings of Miss Eyre. He sent them
to enquire at the coaching inns to see if she had boarded a stagecoach. They were ordered to ask at the turnpikes and at the churches and the vicarages. They knocked at the doors of cottages and at the back doors of the gentry's houses; the front doors were closed now to the name of Rochester. Miss Blanche must be congratulating herself on her narrow escape.

My one consolation was to hear that baby James had survived the night. Grace and Bertha had taken turns to watch over him and to spoon feed him. Grace looked with approval at Bertha as she patiently slipped the precious drops of life-saving milk into the tiny pink mouth. As I watched I wondered which of the residents of Thornfield Hall was mad. Was it this woman with a child at her breast or the pacing red-eyed parody of a man raging about in the library?

I looked in at Martha, my last and least-favourite charge. She was asleep. Her chest rose and fell rhythmically, her breathing deep and slow. She had bound her breasts tightly to stop the milk coming in. I thought of Bertha, locked in a ship's cabin, believing her child to be dead. I thought of Grace, who knew from bitter experience the hardships a woman with no husband has to endure in order for her child to survive. And here lay Martha comfortable in her bed, her face smoothed free of care and restored to its normal size and colour. She slept the sleep of the just while in the next room two women battled to keep her child alive. A moment of malicious joy swept through me; I was glad I had slapped her yesterday. I only wished I had done it harder.

MY MAD MR ROCHESTER

1832

T
WO LETTERS ARRIVED AT THORNFIELD HALL
: one for me, which was not unusual, and one for Grace, which was. They were both written in the same hand. I took Grace's up to her as I was confident she would enjoy the news it contained.

‘You read it.' Grace shook the paper at me; it was the first time I saw her show a small sign of weakness.

‘I don't need to read it. It is the same as mine. It tells us that thirty thousand pounds is deposited in our names in the Bank of Knaresborough.' Grace did a jig of joy. We had feared that Mr Rochester might find a way to cancel our agreement now that the secret of his first marriage was out. I had misjudged him; as a man of honour he had kept his word. ‘You must write to your son,' I told Grace, ‘to let him know the money is safely in our hands. Then he can pay the rent on a house for us. We could be away from here in three weeks. We none of us have much to pack.'

I turned to Bertha. ‘You have your dowry back.'

She ignored me. ‘Bertha happy. Bertha has baby.' She beamed down at the infant on her breast. Sometimes I envied
her; she lived like a lily of the field, careless of all the practical details that fretted and worried the rest of us.

As bad luck would have it, Martha arrived at that moment. That girl had a way of appearing when there was anything to her advantage and disappearing when there was work to be done. I was fearful that she had overheard how much money we had received. The combination of Bertha's devotion to the baby and the arrival of sudden wealth created a situation that Martha could easily twist to her advantage. I could feel my mouth set in a grim line as I determined to prevent her exploiting Bertha and her newly recovered dowry. It was, I told myself virtuously, one of my duties as a trustee.

Martha draped herself round the door frame and examined the three of us in a detached way. You could see her thinking that she was glad to be young; her skin was smooth and soon she would have her waist back. She looked with a critical eye at Bertha, who continued to spoon feed the baby. ‘Watch what you're doing,' she told Bertha. ‘You're spilling that milk all down your dress. Don't make washing. There's enough of it as it is.'

I thought the remark very cheeky. Officially Martha was back at work in the laundry though I doubted she washed anything more than a handkerchief. Tomorrow, I decided, she is going to tackle the sheets. While I was busy devising ways to punish Martha, Grace had been inspecting the front of Bertha's bodice.

‘Look,' she said and pointed at Bertha. Circles of dampness showed up on each breast. We all gazed fixedly at Bertha's bosom.

Grace looked up with wonderment in her eyes. ‘It doesn't seem possible. I don't think it is milk you have spilt, Bertha. I think it is milk that is leaking out of you. You've started to produce milk again.'

I found it difficult to understand the full meaning of what Grace was saying. Martha was even slower. Suddenly she grasped what had happened. She squealed in disgust, made retching sounds and fled to her bedroom. Although she slammed the door shut behind her, it did little to muffle her squeals of distaste. Grace scratched her head and came up with an explanation that sounded both persuasive and reasonable – indeed quite scientific. ‘It must be holding the baby so much. It's the nursing him that's brought the milk in. Try feeding him and see what happens.'

Bertha put the baby to her breast. The baby grabbed the nipple, sucked and seemed satisfied with the results. By this time I had remembered a biblical precedent; being a parson's widow does sometimes have its uses. ‘There's a story in the Bible about a grandmother or a mother-in-law who did the same. Breastfed a grandson. I think it was a Ruth or a Naomi.' The comparison with a grandmother was reassuring; Bertha was near forty. It was ten years since she had fed her own child.

We watched as the child fed. Bertha's face radiated contentment. I remembered how she had been bundled aboard a ship and locked in a cabin while her breasts leaked milk for the baby that had been torn from her. I felt I was witnessing a minor miracle, like a scene from a stained-glass window of the Nativity. There was a strange sense of justice, of an unexpected bounty. Bertha, who had lost her own child, was now able to feed a neglected baby. I assumed some other woman, somewhere in Jamaica, had done the same for Bertha's baby, the boy who was snatched from his crib at night and carried off into the dark. There was no other way for him to survive.

The rooms on the third storey of Thornfield Hall had served in their turn as a torture chamber, a prison, a sewing room and a place of healing: they now became a nursery. A cradle held centre place in the sitting room and little James basked there, bathed in the attention of all the female members of staff and some of the male ones too. John regularly came with Leah so he might see what the future held in store for him when Leah's time came. Old John came to pay his respects to his late friend's grandchild. He pronounced him a fine boy and did his inarticulate best to make Martha proud of her son and serious about his future. To no avail. Sam and Sophie stayed away; they probably thought that fertility was catching.